The Hep-Hep riots in Frankfurt, 1819. On the left, two peasant women are assaulting a Jewish man with pitchfork and broom. On the right, a man wearing spectacles, tails, and a six-button waistcoat, "perhaps a pharmacist or a schoolteacher,"[1] holds another Jewish man by the throat and is about to club him with a truncheon. The houses are being looted. A contemporary engraving by Johann Michael Voltz.

An early reference to a "pogrom" in The Times, December 1903. Together with the New York Times and the Hearst press, they took the lead in highlighting the pogrom in Kishinev (now Chişinău, Moldova) and other cities in Russia.[2] In May of the same year, The Times' Russian Correspondent Dudley Disraeli Braham had been expelled from Russia.[3]

A pogrom is a violent riot aimed at massacre or persecution of an ethnic or religious group, particularly one aimed at Jews. The term originally entered the English language to describe 19th- and 20th-century attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire (mostly within the Pale of Settlement in present-day Ukraine and Belarus). Similar attacks against Jews at other times and places also became retrospectively known as pogroms. The word is now also sometimes used to describe publicly sanctioned purgative attacks against non-Jewish ethnic or religious groups.[4][5][6][7][8]

The Russian word pogrom (погроˊм, pronounced [pɐˈgrom]), is a noun derived from the verb gromit' (громи́ть, pronounced [grɐˈmʲitʲ]) meaning "to destroy, to wreak havoc, to demolish violently".[9] It is used in English and many other languages as a loanword, possibly borrowed via Yiddish (where the word takes the form פאָגראָם pogrom).[10] Its widespread international currency began with the anti-Semitic excesses in the Russian Empire in 1881–1883.[11]

Many pogroms accompanied the post-1917 period of the Russian Civil War: an estimated 70,000 to 250,000 civilian Jews were killed throughout the former Russian Empire; the number of Jewish orphans exceeded 300,000. In his book Two Hundred Years Together, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn provides these numbers from Nahum Gergel's 1951 study of the pogroms in Ukraine: out of an estimated 1,236 incidents of anti-Jewish violence, 887 mass pogroms occurred, the remainder being classified as "excesses" not assuming mass proportions. Of the pogroms in Ukraine, about 40% were perpetrated by the Ukrainian People's Republic forces led by Symon Petliura, 25% by the Ukrainian Green Army and various Ukrainian nationalist gangs, 17% by the White Army, especially the forces of Anton Denikin. A further 8.5% of Gergel's total figure is attributed to pogroms carried out by men of the Red Army – although these pogroms were not sanctioned by the Red Army leadership, and where Red Army troops had perpetrated pogroms, the Bolshevik high command subsequently disarmed entire regiments and executed individual pogromists to deter further outbreaks.[12][13] The Ukrainian People's Republic of Symon Petliura did also issue orders condemning pogroms and attempted to investigate them.[14] But it lacked authority to stop violence.[14] In the last months of its existence it lacked any power of creating social stability.[15]

There were exceptions, however, as related by author and future Nobel laureate Ivan Bunin. On May 15, 1919, Bunin wrote in his diary,

Members of the Red Army in Odessa led a pogrom against the Jewish population in the town of Big Fountain. Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky and the writer Kipen happened to be there and told me the details. Fourteen comissars and thirty Jews from among the common people were killed. Many stores were destroyed. The soldiers tore through the night, dragged the victims from their beds, and killed whomever they met. People ran into the steppe or rushed into the sea. They were chased after and fired upon – a genuine hunt, as it were. Kipen saved himself by accident – fortunately he had spent the night not in his home, but at the White Flower sanitorium. At dawn, a detachment of Red Army soldiers appeared 'Are there any Jews here?' they asked the watchman. 'No, no Jews here.' 'Swear what you're saying is true!' The watchman swore, and they went on farther. Moisei Gutman, a cabby, was killed. He was a dear man who moved us from our dacha last fall.[16]

Gergel's overall figures, which are generally considered conservative, are based on the testimony of witnesses and newspaper reports collected by the Mizrakh-yidish historiche arkhiv, which was first based in Kiev, then Berlin and later New York. The English version of Gergel's article was published in English in 1951 in the YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science titled "The Pogroms in the Ukraine in 1918–1921"[17]

Pogroms spread throughout Central and Eastern Europe. On Holy Saturday of 1389, a pogrom began in Prague that led to the burning of Jewish quarter, the killing of many Jews, and the suicide of many Jews trapped in the main synagogue; numbers of the dead uncertain but the best estimates are four to five hundred men, women, and children, of the approximately 750 Jews who lived in Prague at that time.[18] Seventy-two Jews were killed and 443 injured by Polish troops, militia, and civilians in Poland in the 1918 Lwów pogrom.[19][20][21][22][23] The following year, pogroms were reported in several cities in Poland.[24]

During World War II, the Nazis also encouraged pogroms by local populations, especially early in the war before the larger mass killings began, for two reasons: first, every Jew killed by locals meant one fewer that would have to be killed by the Germans, and second, the pogroms helped make the local populations share responsibility for the killings.[30] One pogrom took place on 8 October 1939, carried out by the local Germans on the occasion of Joseph Goebbels's visit to Łódź.[31]

A number of pogroms occurred during the Holocaust at the hands of non-Germans. Perhaps the deadliest of these Holocaust-era pogroms was the Iaşi pogrom in Romania, in which as many as 13,266 Jews were killed by Romanian citizens, police, and military officials.[32]

On 1–2 June 1941, the two-day Farhud pogrom in Iraq, in which "rioters murdered between 150 and 180 Jews, injured 600 others, and raped an undetermined number of women. They also looted some 1,500 stores and homes".[33][34]

According to Encyclopædia Britannica, "the term is usually applied to attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, [and] the first extensive pogroms followed the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881",[4] and the Wiley-Blackwell Dictionary of Modern European History Since 1789 states that pogroms "were antisemitic disturbances that periodically occurred within the tsarist empire."[5] However, the term is widely used to refer to many events which occurred prior to the Anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire. Historian of Russian Jewry John Klier writes in Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881–1882 that "By the twentieth century, the word 'pogrom' had become a generic term in English for all forms of collective violence directed against Jews."[6]Abramson wrote that "in mainstream usage the word has come to imply an act of antisemitism", since whilst "Jews have not been the only group to suffer under this phenomenon ... historically Jews have been frequent victims of such violence".[9]

The term is also used in reference to attacks on non-Jewish ethnic minorities, and accordingly some scholars do not include antisemitism as a defining characteristic of pogrom. Reviewing its uses in scholarly literature, historian Werner Bergmann proposes that pogroms be "defined as a unilateral, nongovernmental form of collective violence initiated by the majority population against a largely defenseless ethnic group, and occurring when the majority expect the state to provide them with no assistance in overcoming a (perceived) threat from the minority,"[7] but adds that in western usage, the word's "anti-Semitic overtones" have been retained.[11] Historian David Engel supports this, writing that "there can be no logically or empirically compelling grounds for declaring that some particular episode does or does not merit the label [pogrom]," but he offers that the majority of the incidents "habitually" described as pogroms took place in societies significantly divided by ethnicity and/or religion where the violence was committed by the higher-ranking group against a stereotyped lower-ranking group against whom they expressed some complaint, and with the belief that the law of the land would not be used to stop them.[8]

There is no universally accepted set of characteristics which define the term pogrom.[8][45] Klier writes that "when applied indiscriminately to events in Eastern Europe, the term can be misleading, the more so when it implies that "pogroms" were regular events in the region and that they always shared common features."[6] Use of the term to refer to events in 1918–19 in Polish cities including Kielce, Pinsk and Lwów was specifically avoided in the 1919 Morgenthau Report (preferring "excesses"), whose authors argued that the term pogrom was inapplicable to the conditions existing in a war zone and required the situation to be antisemitic in nature rather than political,[8][46][47] and media use of the term pogrom to refer to the 1991 Crown Heights riot caused public controversy.[48][49][50] In 2008, two separate attacks in the West Bank by Israeli Jewishsettlers on PalestinianArabs were characterized as pogroms by then Prime Minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert.[51][52]

Werner Bergmann (Professor of Sociology at the Center for Research on Antisemitism at the Technical University of Berlin) suggests a particular unifying character for all such incidents: "[b]y the collective attribution of a threat, the pogrom differs from other forms of violence, such as lynchings, which are directed at individual members of a minority group, while the imbalance of power in favor of the rioters distinguishes pogroms from other forms of riot (food riots, race riots, or 'communal riots' between evenly matched groups), and again, the low level of organization separates them from vigilantism, terrorism, massacre and genocide".[53]

Aulus Avilius Flaccus, the Egyptianprefect of Alexandria appointed by Tiberius in 32 CE, may have encouraged the outbreak of violence; Philo wrote that Flaccus was later arrested and eventually executed for his part in this event. Scholarly research around the subject has been divided on certain points, including whether the Alexandrian Jews fought to keep their citizenship or to acquire it, whether they evaded the payment of the poll-tax or prevented any attempts to impose it on them, and whether they were safeguarding their identity against the Greeks or against the Egyptians.

After an episode of famine and bad harvests, a pogrom happened in Lisbon, Portugal,[58] in which more than 500 "New Christian" (forcibly converted Jews) people were slaughtered and/or burnt by an angry Christian mob, in the first night of what became known as the "Lisbon Massacre". The killing occurred from 19 to 21 April, almost eliminating the entire Jewish or Jewish-descendant community residing in that city. Even the Portuguese military and the king himself had difficulty stopping it. The event is today remembered with a monument in S. Domingos' church.

A much bloodier wave of pogroms broke out from 1903 to 1906, leaving an estimated 2,000 Jews dead and many more wounded, as many Jewish residents took arms to defend their families and property from the attackers. The 1905 pogrom against the Jewish population in Odessa was the most serious pogrom of the period, with reports of up to 2,500 Jewish people killed.

During the Polish-Ukrainian War over three days of unrest in the city, an estimated 52–150 Jewish residents were killed and hundreds injured, with widespread looting carried out by Polish soldiers, as well as lawless civilians, and local criminals. Two hundred and seventy more Ukrainians were killed during this time as well. The Poles did not stop the pogrom until two days after it began. The independent investigations by the British and American missions in Poland stated that there were no clear conclusions and that foreign press reports were exaggerated.

Some of the Jewish residents gathered in the town square in anticipation of the attack by the peasants, but nothing happened on that day. Two days later, however, on a market day, as Jewish historians Martin Gilbert and David Vital claim, peasants attacked their Jewish neighbors.

Coordinated attacks against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and parts of Austria, carried out by SA paramilitary forces and non-Jewish civilians. Accounts from the foreign journalists working in Germany sent shock waves around the world.

As the privileges of the paramilitary organisation Iron Guard were being cut off by ConducătorIon Antonescu, members of the Iron Guard, also known as the Legionnaires, revolted. During the rebellion and pogrom, the Iron Guard killed 125 Jews and 30 soldiers died in the confrontation with the rebels.

The local rabbi was forced to lead a procession of about 40 people to a pre-emptied barn, killed and buried along with fragments of a destroyed monument of Lenin. A further 250-300 Jews were led to the same barn later that day, locked inside and burned alive using kerosene

Mobs made up largely of ethnic Azeris formed into groups that went on to attack and kill Armenians both on the streets and in their apartments; widespread looting and a general lack of concern from police officers allowed the situation to worsen

A three-day riot that occurred in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, New York. The riots incited by the death of the seven-year-old Gavin Cato, unleashed simmering tensions of the Crown Heights' black community against the Orthodox Jewish community. In its wake, several Jews were seriously injured; one Orthodox Jewish man, Yankel Rosenbaum, was killed; and a non-Jewish man, allegedly mistaken by rioters for a Jew, was killed by a group of African-American men.[71][72]

Over 4,000 Serbs were forced to leave their homes, 935 Serb houses, 10 public facilities and 35 Serbian Orthodox church-buildings were desecrated, damaged or destroyed, and six towns and nine villages were ethnically cleansed according to Serbian media

^Sandra Gambetti: "A final note on the use of terminology related to anti-Semitism. Scholars have frequently labeled the Alexandrian events of 38 C.E. as the first pogrom in history and have often explained them in terms of an ante litteram explosion of anti-Semitism. This work deliberately avoids any words or expressions that in any way connect, explicitly or implicitly, the Alexandrian events of 38 C.E. to later events in modern or contemporary Jewish experience, for which that terminology was created. ... To decide whether a word like pogrom, for example, is an appropriate term to describe the events that are studied here, requires a comparative re-discussion of two historical frames—the Alexandria of 38 C.E. and the Russia of the end of the nineteenth century. That wide and delicate topic cannot be addressed here and will be the subject of future research."[54]

^John Klier: "upon the death of the Grand Prince of Kiev Sviatopolk, rioting broke out in Kiev against his agents and the town administration. The disorders were not specifically directed against Jews and are best characterised as a social revolution. This has not prevented historians of medieval Russia from describing them as a pogrom."[55][56]George Vernadsky: "Incidentally, one should not suppose that the movement was anti-Semitic. There was no general Jewish pogrom. Wealthy Jewish merchants suffered because of their association with Sviatopolk's speculations, especially his hated monopoly on salt."[57]

^John Klier: "Russian armies led by Tsar Ivan IV captured the Polish city of Polotsk. The Tsar ordered drowned in the river Dvina all Jews who refused to covert to Orthodox Christianity. This episode certainly demonstrates the overt religious hostility towards the Jews which was very much a part of Muscovite culture, but its conversionary aspects were entirely absent from modern pogroms. Nor were the Jews the only heterodox religious group singled out for the tender mercies of Muscovite religious fanaticism."[55]

^Israeli ambassador to Ireland, Boaz Moda'i: "I think it is a bit over-portrayed, meaning that, usually if you look up the word pogrom it is used in relation to slaughter and being killed. This is what happened in many other places in Europe, but that is not what happened here. There was a kind of boycott against Jewish merchandise for a while but that’s not a pogrom."[59]

^William Rubinstein: "London-based sources, especially the press, Jewish and non-Jewish, consistently exaggerated the resemblance of the Welsh riots to Russian 'pogroms'. ... The Western Mail's 'London Letter' pointed this out on 28 August 1911, when it stated that 'both the Government and the Jewish leaders think that the Jewish press is betraying an unnecssary amount of alarm, and that it would have been better advised to have treated the attacks upon Jews and their property in Wales as part of a general attack upon persons and property'. Perhaps the most cogent letter on this subject came from Bertam Jacobs, a Welsh-born London barrister who wrote to the South Wales Argus. ... Jacobs pointed out the absurdity of likening the South Wales riots to the Russian pogroms, noting the crucial differences between the two, especially the fact that no Jew was physically assautled, no private house belonging to a Jew was set up, no anti-Semitic cries or slogans were heard, and, especially, no synagogue was attacked."[60][61]

^David Engel: "the repeated protests of some scholars that what happened in Lwów in November 1918 was not, strictly speaking, a “pogrom”"[63]Norman Davies: "The so-called pogrom in Lwów, in November 1918, turned out to be a military massacre where three times more Christians died than Jews."[64]Morgenthau report: The report's authors argued that the term pogrom was inapplicable to the conditions existing in a war zone and required the situation to be antisemitic in nature rather than political.[46]

^Carole Fink: "What happen in Pinsk on April 5, 1919 was not literally a "pogrom" – an organized, officially tolerated or inspired massacre of a minority such as has occurred in Lemberg – but rather a miliary execution of a small, suspect group of civilians. ... The misnamed "Pinsk pogrom", a plain, powerful, alliterative phrase, entered history in April 1919. Its importance lay not only in its timing, during the tensest moments of the Paris Peace Conference and the most crucial deliberations over Poland's political future: The reports of Pinsk once more demonstrated the swift transmission of local violence to world notice and the disfiguring process of rumor and prejudice on every level."[65]Norman Davies: "The so-called pogrom in Pinsk in March 1919 turned out to be work of a panicky lieutenant, whose order to executre thirty-five suspected Bolshevik infiltrators was described by a US investigator as 'fully justified by the circumstances'"[64]

^Norman Davies: "Press reports in the West of 'Pogroms in Poland', though accepted by Jewish commentators, were repeatedly discredited by the investigations of independent British and American observers....the pogroms in Wilno in April 1919 and again in October 1920 were occasioned by the Red Army's hasty retreats, and by military reprisals against suspected collaborators."[64]

^Tom Segev: "The murder of Jews in Hebron was not a pogrom in the historic sense. ... Unlike attacks on the Jews of Eastern Europe, the authorities did not initiate the Hebron riots, and the police did not simply stand aside ... most of Hebron's Jews were saved because Arabs hid them in their homes."[66]

^David Engel: "similar claims [that] the killing of two Jews and one Pole in the townlet of Przytyk in March 1936 [was not, strictly speaking, a “pogrom”], which became the subject of a similar bit of semantic legerdemain and ongoing argument in Poland and beyond in 2001"[63]

^Media use of the term pogrom to refer to the 1991 Crown Heights riot caused public controversy.[50][69] For example Joyce Purnick of The New York Times wrote in 1993 that usage of the word pogrom was "inflammatory"; she accused politicians of "trying to enlarge and twist the word" in order to "pander for Jewish voters".[70]

^ ab"Pogrom", Encyclopædia Britannica. "pogrom, (Russian: "devastation," or "riot"), a mob attack, either approved or condoned by authorities, against the persons and property of a religious, racial, or national minority. The term is usually applied to attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries."

^ abcJohn Klier (2011). Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881–1882. Cambridge University Press. p. 58."By the twentieth century, the word "pogrom" had become a generic term in English for all forms of collective violence directed against Jews. The term was especially associated with Eastern Europe and the Russian Empire, the scene of the most serious outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence before the Holocaust. Yet when applied indiscriminately to events in Eastern Europe, the term can be misleading, the more so when it implies that "pogroms" were regular events in the region and that they always shared common features. In fact, outbreaks of mass violence against Jews were extraordinary events, not a regular feature of East European life."

^ abFor this definition and a review of scholarly definitions see Wilhelm Heitmeyer and John Hagan, International handbook of violence research, Volume 1 (Springer, 2005) pp 352–55 online

^ abcdAnti-Jewish Violence. Rethinking the Pogrom in East European History. Edited by Jonathan Dekel-Chen, David Gaunt, Natan M. Meir, and Israel Bartal "No doubt many will contend that history suggests the need for a serious attempt to clarify what a pogrom is or is not. In the event, however, no such clarification is possible, for "pogrom" is not a pre-existing natural category but an abstraction created by human beings in order to divide complex and infinitely varies social phenomena into manageable units of analysis. As a result, in the absence of universal agreement concerning the specific behaviours to which the word refers or of some supreme authority to whom the power of definition has been delegated, there can be no logically or empirically compelling grounds for declaring that some particular episode does or does not merit the label. "Engel states that although there are no "essential defining characteristics of a pogrom", the majority of the incidents "habitually" described as pogroms "took place in divided societies in which ethnicity or religion (or both) served as significant definers of both social boundaries and social rank, ... involved collective violent applications of force by members of what perpetrators believed to be a higher-ranking ethnic or religious group against members of what they considered a lower-ranking or subaltern group, ... appliers of the decisive force tended to interpret the behaviour of victims according to stereotypes commonly applied to the groups to which they belonged, ... perpetrators expressed some complaint about the victims' group, ... [and] a fundamental lack of confidence on the part of those who purveyed decisive violence in the adequacy of the impersonal rule of law to deliver true justice in the event of a heinous wrong."

^ abA prayer for the government: Ukrainians and Jews in revolutionary times, 1917–1920, Henry Abramson "The etymological roots of the term pogrom are unclear, although it seems to be derived from the Slavic word for "thunder(bolt)" (Russian: grom, Ukrainian: hrim). The first syllable, po-, is a prefix indicating "means" or "target". The word therefore seems to imply a sudden burst of energy (thunderbolt) directed at a specific target. A pogrom is generally thought of as a cross between a popular riot and a military atrocity, where an unarmed civilian, often urban, population is attacked by either an army unit or peasants from surrounding villages, or a combination of the two. Early instances of this phenomenon in the Russian Empire were described using various terms (here in Russian): demonstratsii, gonenie, draky, besporiadki (demonstrations, persecution, fights, riots). Pogrom, however, has been the most effective in entering European languages, perhaps through Yiddish usage. Jews have not been the only group to suffer under this phenomenon, but historically Jews have been frequent victims of such violence. In mainstream usage, the word has come to imply an act of antisemitism."

^ abInternational handbook of violence research, Volume 1 (Springer, 2005) "The word "pogrom" (from the Russian, meaning storm or devastation) has a relatively short history. Its international currency dates back to the anti-Semitic excesses in Tsarist Russia during the years 1881–1883, but the phenomenon existed in the same form at a much earlier date and was by no means confined to Russia. As John D. Klier points out in his seminal article "The pogrom paradigm in Russian history", the anti-Semitic pogroms in Russia were described by contemporaries as demonstrations, persecution, or struggle, and the government made use of the term besporiadok (unrest, riot) to emphasize the breach of public order. Then, during the twentieth century, the term began to develop along two separate lines. In the Soviet Union, the word lost its anti-Semitic connotation and came to be used for reactionary forms of political unrest and, from 1989, for outbreaks of interethnic violence; while in the West, the anti-Semitic overtones were retained and government orchestration or acquiescence was emphasized."

^Joanna B. Michlic (2006). Poland's Threatening Other: The Image of the Jew from 1880 to the Present. University of Nebraska Press. p. 111. "One of the first and worst instances of anti-Jewish violence was Lwow pogrom, which occurred in the last week of November 1918. In three days 72 Jews were murdered and 443 others injured. The chief perpetrators of these murders were soldiers and officers of the so-called Blue Army, set up in France in 1917 by General Jozef Haller (1893–1960) and lawless civilians".

^Herbert Arthur Strauss (1993). Hostages of Modernization: Studies on Modern Antisemitism, 1870–1933/39. Walter de Gruyter. p. 1048. "In Lwow, a city whose fate was disputed, the Jews tried to maintain their neutrality between Poles and Ukrainians, and in reaction a pogrom was held in the city under auspices of the Polish army"

^Gilman, Sander L.; Milton Shain (1999). Jewries at the Frontier: Accommodation, Identity, Conflict. University of Illinois Press. p. 39. ISBN0-252-06792-4. OCLC9780252067921. After the end of the fighting and as a result of the Polish victory, some of the Polish soldiers and the civilian population started a pogrom against the Jewish inhabitants. Polish soldiers maintained that the Jews had sympathized with the Ukrainian position during the conflicts

^Marsha L. Rozenblit (2001). Reconstructing a National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria During World War I. Oxford University Press. p. 137. "The largest pogrom occurred in Lemberg. Polish soldiers led an attack on the Jewish quarter of the city on November 21–23, 1918 that claimed 73 Jewish lives".

^Zvi Y. Gitelman (2003). The Emergence of Modern Jewish Politics: Bundism and Zionism in Eastern Europe. University of Pittsburgh Press. p. 58. "In November 1918, Polish soldiers who had taken Lwow (Lviv) from the Ukrainians killed more than seventy Jews in a pogrom there, burning synagogues, destroying Jewish property, and leaving hundreds of Jewish families homeless."

^"World War II: Before the War", The Atlantic, June 19, 2011. "Windows of shops owned by Jews which were broken during a coordinated anti-Jewish demonstration in Berlin, known as Kristallnacht, on Nov. 10, 1938. Nazi authorities turned a blind eye as SA stormtroopers and civilians destroyed storefronts with hammers, leaving the streets covered in pieces of smashed windows. Ninety-one Jews were killed, and 30,000 Jewish men were taken to concentration camps.

^Jan Tomasz Gross, "Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland", Penguin Books, Princeton University Press, 2002.

^Bostom, Andrew G. (Ed.) 2007. The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History.

^Bergmann writes that "the concept of "ethnic violence" covers a range of heterogeneous phenomena, and in many cases there are still no established theoretical and conceptual distinctions in the field (Waldmann, 1995:343)" Bergmann then goes on to set out a variety of conflicting scholarly views on the definition and usage of the term pogrom.

^"As a Jew, I was ashamed at the scenes of Jews opening fire at innocent Arabs in Hebron. There is no other definition than the term 'pogrom' to describe what I have seen."Settlers attack Palestinian village

^Klier also writes that Alexander Pereswetoff-Morath has advanced a strong argument against considering the Kiev riots of 1113 an anti-Jewish pogrom. Pereswetoff-Morath writes in "A Grin without a Cat" (2002) that "I feel that Birnbaum's use of the term "anti-Semitism" as well as, for example, his use of "pogrom" in references to medieval Rus are not warranted by the evidence he presents. He is, of course, aware that it may be controversial."

^ abcIn God's Playground, Volume II, p192, Norman Davies writes in relation to events in Lviv (1918), Pinsk (1919) and Vilnius (1919-20): "Press reports in the West of 'Pogroms in Poland', though accepted by Jewish commentators, were repeatedly discredited by the investigations of independent British and American observers. The so-called pogrom in Lwów, in November 1918, turned out to be a military massacre where three times more Christians died than Jews. The so-called pogrom in Pinsk in March 1919 turned out to be work of a panicky lieutenant, whose order to executre thirty-five suspected Bolshevik infiltrators was described by a US investigator as 'fully justified by the circumstances'; the pogroms in Wilno in April 1919 and again in October 1920 were occasioned by the Red Army's hasty retreats, and by military reprisals against suspected collaborators."

^Defending the Rights of Others:The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection, 1878-1938, Carole Fink, 2006, p185

^The Jewish Week, August 9, 2011 "A divisive debate over the meaning of pogrom, lasting for more than two years, could have easily been ended if the mayor simply said to the victims of Crown Heights, yes, I understand why you experienced it as a pogrom."

Dekel-Chen, Jonathan, et al. eds. Anti-Jewish Violence: Rethinking the Pogrom in East European History (Indiana University Press; 2011) 220 pages; scholars examine pogroms of the late 1800s and early 1900s in Poland, Ukraine, Belorussia, Lithuania, Crimea, and Siberia.

Horvitz, Leslie, and Christopher Catherwood, eds. Encyclopedia of War Crimes And Genocide (Facts on File Library of World History, 2006)